Excluding Zero Values from a PivotTable

William has a PivotTable based on parts drawn from a store for a particular piece of equipment. Some parts have not ever been drawn upon and hence the usage is zero. William wonders if there is a way to display in the PivotTable only parts with usage greater than zero.

There are a couple of ways you can handle this situation. One way, obviously, is to remove all the zero-value items from the data from which you create the PivotTable. Another way is to go ahead and create the PivotTable, but then apply a filter to the PivotTable to remove those items with a zero value.

To apply an AutoFilter after the PivotTable is created, all you need to do is select the column to the immediate right of the PivotTable and then create the AutoFilter. (Create the AutoFilter as you normally would in your version of Excel.) Excel is smart enough to know that the AutoFilter should not apply to the blank column, but instead does its work on the rows that make up the PivotTable. Click the triangle to the right of the column on which you want to filter, then select Custom. You can then specify that the filter should only include items with a value greater than zero.

Another thing you can try is handy if the item you want to filter (in this case, the Parts field) is either a column field or a row field. Simply right-click the field after it is placed in the PivotTable, and then choose Settings. You can then specify that you want a particular value (in this case, the value 0) omitted from the PivotTable.